Thanksgiving Day. The turkey is cooked without being dried out like an avian husk. Marshmallows melt into a slimy sugary goop on the sweet potato casserole. Crispy onions wilt on top of the green beans. Cranberry sauce slides out of the can with a thick thwack. Your polite guests help bring these steaming dishes to … Continue reading
“Let her get her condiments! Let her get her condiments!” A voice belonging to a concessions worker piped up in my favor. Not sure who or where the worker was given all the focus I could muster was trained on a plastic basket of ketchup packets. I snatched one. Two. Three. I yanked my hand … Continue reading
What better way to celebrate Father’s Day than with all the leather daddies at New York City’s annual Folsom Street East, the NYC edition of the famous San Francisco kink/leather Folsom Street Fair? Since moving to New York in 2015, Folsom Street East is an event I somehow always seemed to miss with so many … Continue reading
Crazy…. Crazy for feeling so lonely! Patsy Cline’s golden warbling voice echoed through the small exhibition space of the Patsy Cline Museum in Nashville, located right above the cheek-to-a-lot-of-jowl-packed Johnny Cash Museum just downstairs. Here, though, with Patsy, it was simply me and a particularly chatty gaggle of septuagenarians (I’m being generous), arguing over which … Continue reading
“Lord help me, Jesus. I’ve wasted it so help me, Jesus. I know what I am but now that I know that I’ve needed you so…help me, Jesus.” Bellowing from an adjacent restaurant, Kris Kristofferson’s plea to Christ, “Why Me” swept me away while waiting for the elevator at my Nashville hotel. No, it wasn’t … Continue reading
“Everywhere I seem to go on this island seems to me I find degeneracy. There is brawling in bars. There is indecency in public places. And there is the corruption of the young. And now I see it all stems from here—it stems from the FILTH taught here in this very school room!” So spits … Continue reading
“I just want to be perfect,” says Karen Carpenter in the recording studio, played by a Barbie doll fashioned by director Todd Haynes in, what I would argue, is still his best film, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. Thanks to Haynes’s deranged casting choice, Barbie is a flawless proxy for Karen Carpenter, the wholesome clear-voiced … Continue reading
On location of the 59th Venice Biennale Arte Preview for Filthy Dreams! In the next weeks, I’ll post an in-depth review of the main exhibition, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani with anecdotes about accompanying national pavilions. First impression: EXTRAORDINARY! GROUNDBREAKING! But first, a FASHION REPORT: It’s impossible to see/experience this year’s Biennale … Continue reading
“Watch the wire.” That’s what I was warned as I maneuvered my way around marble-topped tables and White House gewgaws at the new 45 Wine & Whiskey Bar, a Trump-themed Trump bar at Trump Tower on a recent Friday night, trying to reach two plush high-backed dusty magenta chairs that wouldn’t look out of place … Continue reading
What is it about Los Angeles that inspires madness? Is it the consistently, unchanging beautiful weather? The constant void of those clear blue skies that would make André Gide sigh? Those palm trees perpetually swaying in the ocean breeze? The respiratory system-suffocating smog? Is it the Manson in the air? Or is it the ever-present … Continue reading